Deontic authority and the maintenance of lay and expert identities during joint decision making: Balancing resistance and compliance

Abstract

Expertise is commonly viewed as a professionalized competence in a specific field. Expert professional identities are produced and reproduced through professional training and other socialization mechanisms, which work to generate for a specific group of individuals a specific set of expert skills and knowledge. In this paper, I examine participants’ orientations to their distinct expert professional identities from the perspective of deontic authority. Drawing on 15 video-recorded church workplace meetings between pastors and cantors as data, and conversation analysis as a theoretical and methodological framework, I analyze situations where a non-expert participant makes a proposal that the expert participant orients to as reasonable to comply with. Specifically, I demonstrate how the expert participants respond to these proposals with displays of deontic authority, arguably in an attempt to maintain their expert identities in the face of their de facto compliance with the proposals. In these situations, the expert participants are shown to invoke (1) a past decision of their own, (2) a future decision of their own, or (3) a pattern that is beyond both participants’ control. Each of these practices involves the expert participant balancing resistance and compliance by minimally acknowledging the content of the non-expert participant’s proposal, while excluding the non-expert from those who have deontic authority in the matter. In so doing, the expert speaker implies that the non-expert proposal speaker lacks (1) procedural knowledge about the specific matters about which it is relevant to make proposals to experts and (2) access to the distinct experiential perspective that characterizes expert perception of things. It is thus argued that, in this context, the mere claims of deontic authority, produced without any substantial displays of expert knowledge, can serve the maintenance of expert professional identities.

When a request turn is segmented: Managing the deontic authority via early compliance

“…The asymmetrical deontic relationship is shown to be modified by the invocation of different deontic and beneficial relationships to themselves. Compared to Stevanovic’s (2021) findings where a speaker who displays their deontic authority maintains their expertise by excluding others as lacking procedural knowledge and/or experiences, this practice seems to invoke the opposite orientation in participants. In other words, the speakers are sensitive to imply high deontic status relative to the recipients and thereby alter the relationship so that higher deontic authority is not claimed to make the request ‘on record’.…”

Expertise as a domain in interaction

“…As far as expertise concerns implications of facts, it connects with questions about what should be done. The question about what should be done now is tied to responsibilities and agencies, as well as goals (see Stevanovic, 2021).…”

“…As far as expertise concerns implications of facts, it connects with questions about what should be done. The question about what should be done now is tied to responsibilities and agencies, as well as goals (see Stevanovic, 2021). Heritage (2013: 371-372) points out that on the well-known TV program Antiques Road Show, there takes place publicly a nice claim of expertise when the owners of the object in question are asked whether they 'have any idea what this is worth'.…”

Den sociale konstruktion af uvidenhed: en medlemskabskategoriseringsanalyse (MCA) af samskabelsen af identiteter, når ældre svagsynede borgere møder ny teknologi

“…Poul raekker da også hånden ud, men bliver afbrudt af instruktøren, der derved producerer den lokale, diskursive identitet 'den, der tager mobilen' for sig selv. Handlingen at tage telefonen producerer således både en diskursiv identitet som den med højest epistemisk positionering og med deontiske (magtmaessige) rettigheder til at bestemme, hvem der kan/må tage telefonen (for uddybning se fx Stevanovic 2021, Stevanovic & Peräkylä 2012, Stevanovic & Svennevig 2015. Det handler imidlertid ikke udelukkende om den deontiske position, men også om adgang til og dermed retten til at bearbejde den viden, som kan opnås gennem interaktion med sønnen.…”